A Cognitive Study Of The Chinese “XV_j-shenme Y”Construction Based On DCM Model

The construction“X Vj-shenme Y”realized in“你算什么医生”,“这叫什么医院”and so on is widely used in modern Chinese,especially in spoken Chinese.Many scholars have investigated its structural,semantic and pragmatic features from the grammatical angle,but the previous researches are all static description,and none of them has touched its cognitive mechanism,let alone any support of a close corpus.This thesis, under the framework of Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, tries to propose an integrated DCM model, which is constructed by the Decategorizaiton Theory, Coercion Theory and Conceptual Metaphtonymy. The model is used to explain its formation, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the “X Vj-shenme Y” construction with assistance of quantitative analysis from the corpus of 624 items of “X Vj-shenme Y” construction and its variants exhaustedly collected from the corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL).Five chapters are included in this thesis. The main ideas are as follows:Chapter One delivers a brief introduction to the motivations, research object and scope, objectives, methodology as well as the layout of this thesis.Chapter Two examines the previous studies concerning the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the “X Vj-shenme Y” construction, and reveals the gap and limitations of those researches.Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework. This paper constructs the new cognitive model DCM by integrating Decategorization Theory, Coercion Theory and Metaphtonymy for the sake of interpreting the working mechanism of “X Vj-shenme Y” construction and revealing the trigger for the decategorization process.Chapter Four is based on data description and gives detailed analysis of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features using DCM supported by the related data and proportion. We have the following findings:Syntactically, the “X Vj-shenme Y” construction has three variants among which the “(X) Vj-shenme Y” is the most typical one with a proportion of 71.81% in our data. Not all the words that enter the position of X, Vj and Y in “X Vj-shenme Y” are compatible with the whole construction, but has their syntactical inclinations. As for X, pronouns and definite nouns are the most typical instances with a total proportion of 65.06%. The Y slot can only be nouns. The prototypical judgment verb for “X Vj-shenme Y” is the Chinese word “算” which amounts to 52.24%. All these inclinations will correspondingly be given the explanations in this chapter.Semantically, the construction meaning requires its lexicons X and Y bear certain semantic relations and certain conceptual compatibility to undergo the decategorization process. Moreover, the author has proposed the assumption of interrogative-negative continuum in accordance with the meaning shift of the three variants in “X Vj-shenme Y”.Pragmatically, the “X Vj-shenme Y” construction not only highlights the expressive mood of disagreement and dissatisfaction but also takes on the features of subjectivity for personal viewpoint toward an event or concept.Chapter Five provides a brief conclusion of the whole paper and deals with the possible contributions made by this research. The main contributions of the study liein:1) This paper, for the first time, constructs a DCM model to investigate the formation mechanism of the Chinese “X Vj-shenme Y” construction, and meanwhile to go further to find out the working mechanism of the decategorization process in this model.2) The semantic evolution for the variants of the “X Vj-shenme Y” construction has given access to the establishment of the interrogative-negative continuum which can well explain the classification confusion of the interrogative, rhetorical and negative sentences.3) A closed corpus is built up for the first time with 624 items. A scientific data analysis and classification of the “X Vj-shenme Y” construction, including their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features has been discussed in accordance with the database.At last, chapter five also puts forth the limitation of this study and gives some suggestions for the further research of this construction.